Friday, June 5, 2009

Friday TV: All Three NASCAR Series On The Air

Kyle Busch and his girlfriend recently took in a Kathy Griffin performance on their days off, but now it is back to work for drivers in all three of NASCAR's top series.

Steve Byrnes steps-in and takes over the Mike Joy position hosting Sprint Cup Series practice as SPEED starts Friday off at noon ET from Pocono. Byrnes gets this role throughout the TNT portion of the Sprint Cup Series schedule.

After thirty minutes of news and interviews hosted by John Roberts at 3PM, NASCAR Live gives way to Sprint Cup qualifying. Byrnes hosts again with Larry McReynolds and Jeff Hammond in the booth. Lindsay Czarniak is back on pit road reporting for this session with Marty Snider.

Jerry Punch leads ESPN2 through one hour of Nationwide Series practice from Nashville, TN at 6PM. Dale Jarrett is off this week, so Rusty Wallace will be alongside of Punch and Andy Petree.

Live action returns at 8:30PM with the Camping World Trucks from the Texas Motor Speedway on SPEED. TDP will have a live blog of that race.

This post will serve to host your comments about the daytime NASCAR TV coverage on both ESPN2 and SPEED. To add your TV-related comment, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly website, so please keep that in mind when posting. Thanks for taking the time to stop by.

Bob Dillner was interviewing Michael Waltrip during the rain-out coverage of qualifying. Michael had Kenny Wallace on his cell phone, put him on speaker and held his phone to the Speed microphone... with Kenny's phone number displayed on the phone!

Darn! That's what I get for being lazy and sleeping in. Didn't get up until 2:30. Too funny! Guess Herman's going to be changing his number soon! But of course I usually have it on in a tab and just listen in the background. I rarely watch the shows all the way through so I probably would have missed it anyhow :rolleyes:

I'm enjoying this All-Star Roundtable. Being TV less I missed it from all the All-Start specials :). Guess there's some good news with the rain.

ESPN's Nashville coverage: TV blackout of Happy Hour, tape-delayed coverage of qualifying tomorrow, and now the only practice session ESPN deems worthy of covering is being pre-empted by baseball running long. It's completely the right decision to stay with the game on ESPN2 don't get me wrong, BUT it's a terrible shame that NASCAR fans don't even get the courtesy of moving practice to another network in the interim, such as ESPN Classic, who is currently re-airing an old baseball game.

I don't know about anyone else but I sure don't feel "blessed" to know that this network will soon be doing this same thing to the Cup Series in a few weeks as well.

After waiting 25 minutes to join the practice coverage already in progress, ESPN has now been on the air from Nashville for over 7 minutes. We've seen fancy video packages, highlights of last year's Nashville race, highlights of last week's Dover race, highlights of a 2004 Nashville race, full-screen shots of Dr. Punch and Rusty standing around in the Tech Center, a full-screen point standings display, extended shots of Kyle Busch sitting in the garage doing nothing, and a Jason Leffler interview from the garage area. We've seen just about everything under the sun... except for the practicing racecars they are supposed to be on the air to cover during this "broadcast of Nationwide Practice from Nashville"!

As I watch this junk I'm dreading seeing the Cup cars getting relegated to nothing but background noise at the Brickyard more and more. Goodbye for the night ESPN, no point in watching this false advertisement of Nationwide practice coverage.

@stricklinfan--so more of the same ol' same ol'. What an absolute shame :(. The one chance at real coverage is overshadowed by nonsense :(. Which part of "that's what down time is for" do they not understand? If a yellow comes out or there's weather or something. There's a difference between showing things as part of the intro and being obnoxious

@Wisconsin Steve--thanks for the heads up! I loved that series last year!

Why was Jerry Punch insisting that the 2nd NW practice will be used to set the cars up for qualifying when it was clear (especially since it was mentioned multiple times on the broadcast) that teams were making their mock qualifying runs in the 1st practice and were going to use the 2nd practice to work on race setups? I know why - because that's what the script and production must have decided before they went on air.

Didn't watch any NASCAR today. Thanks for Sirius, they pretty much had the news covered and the "Postman" had the Pocono conditions in hand. "It's raining"No need to even think about tuning to the BSPN coverage. Glad I didn't after reading today's comments.And lastly; I try to like and respect Kyle Busch, I'm sure there is a whole lot of good in him. There has been numerous callers, with first hand knowledge, to Sirius that confirm that he is a good, thoughtful and caring person. The thing that concerns me is the picture posted above. I would not be seen with Kathy Griffin. IMHO she is not a nice person. No, I have never met or talked to her, I only base my opinion by her actions and my beliefs.